Efficient Method Lookup Customization for Smalltalk

Programming languages are still evolving, and programming languages and language features are being designed and implemented every year. Since it is not a trivial task to provide a runtime system for a new language, existing runtime systems such as the Java Virtual Machine or the Common Language Runtime are used to host the new language.

However, most of the high-performance runtime systems were designed for a specific language with a specific semantics. Therefore, if the new language semantics differs from the semantics hard-coded in a runtime system, it has to be emulated on top of features supported by the runtime.

The emulation causes performance overhead.

To overcome the limitations of an emulation, a runtime system may provide a meta-object protocol to alter the runtime semantics. The protocol should fulfill opposing goals: it should be flexible, easy to use, fast and easy to implement at the same time.

We propose a simple meta-object protocol for customization of a method lookup in Smalltalk. A programmer may define his own custom method lookup routine in Smalltalk and let the runtime system to call it when needed. Therefore there is no need to modify the runtime system itself. Our solution provides reasonable performance thanks to low-level support in a runtime system, nevertheless the changes to the runtime system are small and local. At the same time, it provides the flexibility to implement a wide range of features present in modern programming languages.

The presented approach has been implemented and validated on a Smalltalk virtual machine.